FirstFT: EY’s new boss Janet Truncale sets out her top team

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Good morning. We start today with plans for a reshuffle at the top of Big Four accounting firm EY.

New boss Janet Truncale announced her leadership team in an email to partners this week as she prepares to take over the accountancy firm in July and heal divisions following last year’s aborted plan, known as “Project Everest”, to spin off the consultancy business.

Truncale beat four other candidates for the top job in November to become the first female global chief of a Big Four firm. In her email to partners this week, which set out some of her plans for when she takes over, she said the global executive team would be “the same size or smaller”. One of her priorities is to cut costs amid a broader overhaul of operations, according to people familiar with the matter.

She is expected to flesh out her vision for EY at a strategy meeting of senior partners this week in Florida. Here’s more on the proposed changes.

Here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:

• Congress: The House of Representatives votes on a bill that would ban the popular video app TikTok from US app stores unless its Chinese parent ByteDance divests it.

• Companies: Discount retailer Dollar Tree will report earnings for the final quarter of last year before the market opens while homebuilder Lennar reports results after the bell. Starbucks holds its annual shareholder meeting online.

• Financial Times Climate Capital Live: The two-day event provides a unique forum for climate leaders, politicians, chief executives and financiers to discuss how their organisation can move from commitment to implementation on net zero targets.

Five more top stories

1. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have each secured enough delegates to clinch their parties’ US presidential nominations, setting up a rematch of the 2020 race for the White House in November. Trump gained sufficient backing for the Republican nomination after winning a primary contest in Washington yesterday, while Biden prevailed in Georgia. The comfortable wins have demonstrated the candidates’ dominance over their respective parties, but they have also masked some weaknesses on both sides.

2. Some of Japan’s biggest companies, including Honda, Nippon Steel and ANA Holdings, have granted workers pay rises well above inflation in this year’s pay negotiations, a milestone in a country where real wages have stagnated since the late 1990s. The talks have been closely followed by investors this year as robust wage growth is crucial for the Bank of Japan to gain enough confidence to begin unwinding its ultra-loose monetary policy measures. Read more on the shunto negotiations which mostly concluded today.

3. The EU is readying a €7.4bn aid package for Egypt aimed at shoring up its economy amid fears that the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan risk exacerbating financial troubles in the north African nation and raising immigration pressure on Europe. The proposed deal is the latest in a series of EU pacts with northern African countries aimed at avoiding economic instability and halting irregular migration from the region.

4. A new mobilisation law in Ukraine is due to be put to a parliamentary vote on March 31. The bill seeks to update the country’s legal framework ahead of an anticipated recruitment wave this year in which up to 500,000 people could be drafted. The effort is mostly aimed at replacing the 330,000 exhausted troops currently on the battlefield, but the law is proving controversial.

• More on Ukraine: EU countries are set to agree a new €5bn top-up to a fund used to finance military shipments to Kyiv, while the US managed to scrape together $300mn more in ammunition and artillery.

5. China is scrapping infrastructure projects as it struggles to reconcile austerity and economic growth. Beijing has ordered a dozen highly indebted areas, many of them less-developed and far from the coast, to curb infrastructure spending as it tries to unwind a decade-long investment binge many believe is unsustainable. But the austerity drive may make achieving the government’s ambitious 5 per cent growth target even more difficult.

Today’s big read

At first, it was Lazard and Rothschild that Roger Altman’s boutique New York investment bank Evercore had in its sights. But almost three decades later, the firm is now closing the gap on Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley in its core deal advice business. The firm has achieved the feat in part by tapping the alma mater of current chief executive John Weinberg: Goldman Sachs. His arrival in 2016 validated Evercore’s model — and marked a new era of ascendancy that has earned the uptown firm the nickname “Goldman North”.

We’re also reading and listening to . . . 

• China’s economy: What is the future of “communist capitalism” in China? Martin Wolf, who is just back from a trip to China, explores whether Xi-ism is killing Deng-ism in his latest column.

• Carried interest: A top London private equity lawyer has warned that Labour’s plan to raise the tax rate on buyout executives could be more damaging than Brexit.

• Israel-Hamas war: Israel has yet to achieve all its wartime goals in Gaza. But for Hamas, victory now has largely narrowed to one thing: survival.

Join FT colleagues on March 21 at noon UK time for a subscriber webinar on the Israel-Hamas war, fears of a wider conflict and the chance of a long-term settlement. Register now and put your questions to the panel.

Chart of the day

The unexpected rise last month in inflation highlights the challenge faced by the US Federal Reserve in the “last mile” of its flight against inflation. The increase in February’s annual consumer price index was largely stoked by services such as motor insurance and healthcare and will play an important part in the Fed’s thinking as it prepares to release new economic projections next week.

Take a break from the news

The power of place, women launching start-ups, and the good, bad and ugly of management are among the topics of business books we are reading this month.

Additional contributions from George Russell and Benjamin Wilhelm